The God of High School

Episodes 1-2

I mostly skipped out on Tower of God last season, so The God of High School is set to be my first real engagement with one of Crunchyroll's Originals, not to mention a manhwa adaptation. If you'd like to check out my impressions of the first episode in more detail, you can head on over to the Summer Preview Guide entry that I wrote up. The short version is that, while the premiere's story was light on the concrete story hooks and characterization that I would normally expect from a first episode, it was positively overflowing with kick-ass animation and spectacle, which made the whole thing a blast to watch. Now, with another episode under its belt, the question remains as to whether The God of High School improved on it story's initial shortcomings.

The answer to that question, at least as of Episode 2, is “Not really, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun to watch.” To the show's credit, “renewal/soul” does put in some token efforts to at least try and get us to care about its trio of heroes and the combatants they'll be squaring off against, and the results aren't bad — they're simply unremarkable. A good portion of the episode's first half is devoted to properly introducing the three protagonists of the show, since the madcap chase scene of the first episode was more about setting up the tone of the show than establishing emotional connections. It's very on-the-nose stuff, since Mori, Daewi, and Mira literally just exchange their names and motivations for fighting in the tournament as they walk home from the arena: Daewi is in it for the cash, Mira wants to restore her family's swordsmanship dojo, and Mori is here…well, it seems like he's one of those heroes who just gets a kick out of fighting. Perhaps he just wants to be the very best, like no one ever was.

Point being, we don't get anything here that isn't deeply and unabashedly rooted in the most familiar of action-adventure anime clichés. Even the big bonding moment that comes when Mori and Daewi help Mira recover her wooden sword from the river it ends up in feels fairly cloying and artificial. For one, Mori is the one who doesn't understand personal boundaries enough to stop from repeatedly stealing Mira's sword (which is a keepsake from her dead father, no less), and he's the reason it ends up in the river to begin with. Naturally, this means that Mira is the one who apologizes for slapping the guy (even though he kind of deserved it), and the trio ends up laughing as friends as they comb the water together. Daewi even manages to nab some industrial strength searchlights from his job, which is…convenient? It's all pretty silly and lightweight, but it's functional enough to establish the bare minimum amount of investment on the audience's part.

Thankfully, the second half of the episode is more entertaining, because it gets to the spectacle that we already know The God of High School does so damn well. Director Sunghoo Park and the crew at MAPPA are pros when it comes to choreographing action that has weight and impact, and the animation can twist and bend as needed to keep the “camera” moving without getting the audience confused. The montage of one-off fights that come before the main bout “renewal/soul” admittedly feels a bit perfunctory, serving only to introduce a couple of secondary characters (Ma Miseon and Baek Seungchul) while reminding us that there are a lot more fights happening than just the ones we spend time on. When Gamdo and Manseok go head-to-head, though, The God of High School puts the pedal to the floor and gives us another knockout fight that delivers with every satisfying blow each opponent delivers.

I'll be honest, the character beats that got sprinkled in throughout the fights didn't do much for me, and it's again because they feel so familiar that you barely register them in between all of the cool martial arts explosions going off around them. On a technical level, I'm always interested to see the mechanical and philosophical differences between styles come into play, which we get a lot of here: Gamdo's taichi versus Manseok's northern-style taekwondo is a distinct clash of defensive composure and no-holds barred brutality, and then eventually Mori's “Renewal Taekwondo” enters the mix to shut Manseok's down. I still don't really give a damn about who these people are or why they're fighting, but I appreciate that The God of High School is gracious enough to be exciting enough to watch that I can get over that, for now.

The finale of this episode offers a whole lot of plot morsels to chew on in addition to the now straight-up supernatural combat. Manseok's powerup comes with a flashback where a woman admonishes him for being “garbage [that] can't use charyeok”, and I'm assuming that “charyeok” is going to be some kind of mystical energy source that will come into play eventually. The GOH agents join the fray too, to both shut down Manseok and admonish Mori for breaking the rules of the tournament by interfering, and this is where we get another brief glimpse of Mujin Park, the villainous seeming mystery man with the cross tattoo on his palm. You'd be forgiven for not remembering his involvement in the brief scenes of international intrigue and island destruction we've witnessed in these first two episodes, since they've had absolutely nothing to do with the story so far.

The good new is that The God of High School is at least giving us the crumbs of a larger story that will hopefully give all of these fun beat-'em-ups some much needed context. After all, the common thread between any piece of media that focuses on a fighting tournament is that you can't just have the fighting be the whole story. Mortal Kombat has the whole fate of the multiverse thing going on in the background, Enter the Dragon uses its tournament as a pretense for Bruce Lee to hunt down an international crime lord, and so on. Time will tell if whatever Mujin is up to will be interesting enough to fill out a full season's worth of fight scene after fight scene, but it will hopefully give us more to work with than simply gushing about how gosh-darn cool it looks every week.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• If you're in the mood for even more awesome, bloody brawls in your anime, I highly recommend checking out another series from Sunghoo Park and MAPPA: Garo -Vanishing Line-. It's a series I've come to love even more as time has passed, and it will please anyone who ever wished tokusatsu shows like Power Rangers were R-rated (but still just as goofy).

• Given how much The God of High School is using its production values as its selling point, I'll probably have to highlight some of the best cuts of animation coming from each episode. Between these two entries, my favorite moment is probably Mori's “Renewal Taekwondo” mid-air triple-kick. It isn't the most bone crunching moment of his rematch with Manseok, but there's an elegance to it that I just can't get enough of.

• I feel like the nanomachines used to make everyone functionally immortal are being very underplayed by the show so far, though they do offer a great joke when we learn that Mira literally broke Mori's neck when she got her sword back from him, and she does it again for good measure.

The God of High School is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.